A Painting! Yes, really!

A little breather between collages took the shape of this small painting:



Calm Before the Storm



 I have tried photographing it in every room, on every terrace, using every setting on the camera .... and still the true dark colour of the sky refuses to be pinned down!

 

In reality I used a mix of Windsor Blue and Violet with a dash of black

to make a rich night sky and here it is, looking like daytime!

The sheep have a muddy Naples Yellow wash too, but you wouldn't know it.

But I have lost patience now.

If I get a truer photo I will replace it.

 

Anyway, it's a small piece intended for a group show in St Ives in August, quarried

from one of my old sketchbooks with doodles done on my last visit to the Peak District.

 

 

Many, many years ago, when I lived there, I used to make and sell sheep along the lines of "fairings"

out of plaster. Very primitive. And I still have these three hanging around in the studio here, very much the worse for wear.

But still inspiring me, it seems, years later.

I'll never kick the Staffordshire pottery habit!

 



Progress in paradise ...

Golly, the sheep are threatening to overwhelm things. I may have to have a cull ... Though I have to say Palmer was never one to eek out his sheep when it came to a rural landscape.

And there's William Wordsworth, contemplating the moon in the finest nocturnal Romantic tradition of contemplating the moon, life, love and everything. And sheep, of course.

I almost had a disaster when I came in and discovered the big ginger, Princess Pushy, lying fast asleep in total feline abandon right across the board. (Actually, thinking about it, it would be a cat-astrophe, not a disaster). Anyway, to a large extent it was as so much was dislodged (and this despite my not yelling at her so as not to frighten her and scatter the lot), it took ages to restore order (thank goodness for my digital images).

Am having trouble finding a nice large piece of slightly off-white for the house .... nothing in the scrap boxes is quite what I have in mind. And I really like to start the process of sticking the whole collage beginning with the house itself. 

Might have to resort to the stationer or art shop tomorrow .....

Little Brontë foxes

Finished at last!

It's been a long time coming, mainly because of other stuff, as I mentioned before. Can't be doing with distracting background noise, literal or metaphorical, brings out the worst kind of procrastination in me.

Anyway, here it is, Haworth Parsonage in the snow (despite the fact that we have been experiencing summertime temperatures over here for the last few days).

The snowmen, which started out more prominent, have been relegated to watchers - watching the three sisters watching them from inside. So they retain their sinister, gothicky aspect even if somewhat watered down. The foxes were introduced as a splash of colour (I just knew that National Geographic portrait of an orange-haired kabuki actor would come in useful one day!) and movement. Three sisters ... three foxes ... mmmmm. Three snowmen if it comes to that. Obviously highly significant.

Or maybe not.

As is often the case with these house portraits it was a piece of the occupants' writings that settled me on the final image.

In this case a poem by Emily which starts:

The moon is full this winter night;

The stars are clear though few;

And every window glistens bright

With leaves of frozen dew ...

Well okay, lots of snowflakes rather than a few stars and lamplight rather than leaves of frozen dew.

Big full moon though.

 

Anyway, it is ready in time for my Christmas 2012 greeting card collection.

Method in my madness.

Haworth Parsonage Revisited

I have done another Haworth for the ABNA show. Slightly smaller with transportation in mind. It's a tighter composition and has the addition of Victoria and Adelaide, the Brontë geese exiting stage left. The moors are darker and the moon has a yellowish tinge though it probably doesn't show up much on the photo.


Comparing the two reminds me a bit of those spot the difference pictures you used to get in comics years ago.
I did consider putting Black Tom, the Brontë cat into the mix but haven't so far. However, there is still another 24 hours before I take this to the framers - anything might happen!

Haworth Parsonage, Autumn Evening

I finished this piece, pasting the final leaf on, at about 2 o'clock this morning. Obsessive or what? Anyway, I am fairly happy with it and it captures the atmosphere I was after. Gone are the dog and the plethora of graves. It would be too easy to always plump for a strictly bleak and tragic view ... coloured by our knowledge of how their brief lives played out. It's autumnal, yes, but happy autumnal I hope. Before the advent of the grim reaper down Haworth way.

"My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the profound, the intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas from the same source - when they have clung to each other from childhood ...", said Charlotte Brontë in 1841

Detail showing the sisters

So there she is clinging to Anne by the side of the parsonage, Emily striding out across the moor in the background. The three large birds? The sisters' soaring imagination, with the distant Branwell perversely flying in the opposite direction, poor thing.

And there they are again, inside the plain, solid, somewhat comfortless house (their father brooked no curtains or carpets for fear of fire, apparently) looking out of the windows.

I once read a Freudian interpretation of Wuthering Heights, the author of which had counted the number of times that windows and doors featured in the work. Having lived with the facade of Haworth Parsonage for a couple of weeks I have to say that windows were an architectural feature the Brontës must have had an awful lot of trouble ignoring in their day-to-day lives.
They certainly had me cursing with the fiddly panes.

Eight years after Charlotte Brontë wrote the lines quoted above, she was to write to her friend, wryly laughing off the suggestion she take a companion (her siblings having died in the intervening years):
"... the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth - to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect - the dead silence of a village parsonage - in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long - and a grave, silent spinster for her companion ..."
Needless to say she didn't wish the fate on anyone.

Now that does sound a grim and tragic scenario, but even that isn't as grim and tragic as the one which would be the lot of their father who outlived them all by six years,

I feel a bleaker parsonage picture coming on ....